a magazine devoted to gay literature

07/06/2017

I'm On Fire

I'm on Fire

Nick Faulk

We emerged out of the sun-parched, red-dusted canyon and onto the rim, him a stride's length before me. His shoulders eclipsed the sun. His hair swirled into a vortex on the back of his head; the man in the moon. We walked without speech, but the soft rhythm of our footsteps and the sand grinding beneath our boots filled the dead air. Almost a cacophony in the semi-arid silence, the sound bounced across canyon walls, maneuvered down arroyos, landed in the creek below.

“I never caught your name,” he said.

“Chris.”

“Mitchell,” he said, as if I did not already know.

In front of his body, the sun had begun its slide beneath the mesa on the Western horizon. The town awaiting us was cloaked in crepuscular darkness. The trail, the wind-worn outcrops, the creosote, and the landings beyond the ledges were bathed in shadow, recognizable yet undiscernable. Refuges of light dotted the territory, still, from crevasses in the blood red, western hills. The copper-toned ridges would glow, and so would he. Stepping into what remained of the sun illuminated his profile. He let me see his face, his nose a gentle, cresting bluff. From the shadows, I smiled.

“We should go hunting,” he said. “Sometime.” He kept his back to me as he spoke.

A bush rustled, but nothing emerged. Javelina lurk in the brush at dusk and they lurk in my mind. Shadows leapt from leaves like ghosts. Spiders, I assured myself, if anything at all. The iron-rusted earth glowed most vividly before the dusk.

The last of the twilight seemed to consume the backcountry in flames. These hills were on fire and so was I.

“I guess I will see you at the bar, sooner or later,” I said to the back of his amber, dust-streaked hair.

“I am sure of it.”

We stood in the darkness together for just a moment longer in a space just short of eye contact.

* * *

After that separation, I avoided his bar at first. In action became an action in itself. I found other places to drink, whether with co-workers or alone. Work kept me busy between a couple of beats for the Verde Independent and a column in a local magazine, a non-traditional trade publication focused on the metaphysical and the uncanny in and around Sedona. I thought of him when I was the only attendee under fifty at a city council meeting. He crossed my mind when a crystal healer told me that Francisco de Sales sits on my shoulder. I was certain that I saw him at a midnight party where we stacked cairns to welcome visits by friendly aliens, but when I finally resolved to search him out, he was not among the faded faces surrounding the bonfire.

I met a girl named Sara, a student at the college in Flagstaff. We went hiking a few times, and I would stand in awe of the majesty of the ochre colored San Francisco peaks. At nightfall, though, they did not glow, and neither did she. Her green eyes captured the sunlight; light tumbled in and never escaped. I let her drift away.

I found myself back in his bar on an evening when he worked, seated at the farther bar stool, a pot convenient to the drafts from the back patio. He spoke little to me, his figure bathed in neon light as he poured whiskey for tourists. For the most part, he left me to admire the taxidermied mule deer heads that covered my corner of the room. A few times, we made conversation.

“I met the guy who owns my bungalow today,” Mitchell said. “His house was full of parrots, and, I guess, other exotic birds like that. I am not sure how anybody could live like that,” he said.

“Bird shit everywhere,” I said.

“Oh yeah, that place stank. But I got to really talk to the guy about how messed up my windows were. He's going to pay for new ones as long as I install them.” He glowed when he spoke; his face always caught the light of the jukebox.

“That's awesome, I said.

He went outside to smoke, and I followed him.

“We should go to a vortex sometime,” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “They're a huge part of the reason I came out here.”

“Oh yeah? Where you from, anyway?”

“Down south, both sides of the border.”

“Hell yeah. I need to get out of here. I swore I would leave after high school, but here we are. Maybe I should go to Mexico. They have bars there.”

I stayed late that night, closed out his bar. We fell asleep in the back room.

* * *

Winter turned to Spring, and when Spring turned to Summer, I moved up the mountain, into the land of pines and rumors of off-season snow. I took up a writing job at a magazine, fished for some freelance work. I found myself ghostwriting a mystery novel. With a plot outline and a signature character from the credited author, I filled in the blanks. I would sit out in an aspen grove within walking distance of my house, flesh out the story of Barbara Lee.

I wrote a section in which Barbara Lee, international gumshoe, questioned a bartender who may have served a diplomat a whiskey the evening he disappeared. Trouble was, this bartender claimed an alibi, said that he was stacking rocks to greet the aliens. When Barbara asked if they came to him, the bartender explained, simply, they never left.

That evening, I drove down the switchbacks, off the mountain, into the creek’s floodplain, and then towards the sweeping vistas of the town below. A flicker of fire in my veins; I sat up at the end of his bar.

He ignored me much of the night. It was busy, after all. I waited him out. Once we neared closing time, and, at last, it was me, him, and those who were too drunk to count.

“How have you been?” I asked him after he served me another beer.

“Same shit, different day,” he said. “I'm thinking of going to Florida, getting away from all this woo-woo shit.”

“Yeah?”

“You get it. You left.”

“Just up the road, really. They still hunt for Sinagua Lizardmen up there.”

“I don’t know about that. This town is just a phase I cannot move on from.”

“You can't leave just yet.”

“And why can't I?”

I stared down at my beer. He shuffled away to greet an entrant. We slept in the back of the bar again. Just slept. He had done this recently. He had a blanket, which we lacked before.

* * *

That summer brought a fire on one of the mountains northeast of Flagstaff. Smoke poured over the foothills like lava, crashed into the heart of the town. Had to leave. I drove south again. Not to his bar, this time, but to the canyon, not just one of dozens that ring the town, but the one that we first explored together. Down the trail, into the crevasses, and back out again. At a bench that overlooked the creek, I went the wrong way towards the descent and into the flood plain, turned around, and decided to sit on the bench and gaze out onto the vista.

The vortexes of Sedona are recognized by the presence of two things: first, trees grown into spiral shapes, bark twisting around the base like a whirlwind, and the branches gently twisting around themselves, and second, the uncanny sensation of peace, health, and stillness through energy. Vortexes litter the arid landscape, and so to do the tourists, the townies, and the New Agers searching for adventure, healing, and spiritual awakening down among the scrubland. The trails without the warped junipers, though, offered the best hope of silence for those who search.

I passed rosary beads through my fingers as I sat. Bead by bead, beat by beat. Simply a meditation, a stillness. Maybe he was gone by now, maybe he had stayed. I sat in a silence. I could do nothing either way.

__________

Nick Faulk is a librarian from Burlington, Vermont. His fiction has previously been published in Curios, a small art and literature magazine based in and focused on his former home of northern Arizona. His current projects include co-writing a chapter on motivation techniques that enhance student learning online for the forthcoming book Effective Library Instruction: Inspiring Student Motivation from Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Press.